As far as time sinks go, FFXIV has respected my time and offered me actual content much, much better than just about any other MMO right now. Though there, there's very little reason to do your typical generic side quests - levelling has been structured so that you level along with the story. You can get to max level just doing main quests and main story scenarios. Besides some early hurdles during ARR, the main story quests have more than decent production values, being full of well voiced cutscenes and keeping the plot moving. The main story does take its time, yes, but at least it respects it enough to be both engaging, entertaining and well written. As for the side content, I cannot say it's very time consuming. Side faction daily quests, of which you can do a total of 12 per day, can be finished within 15 minutes. The main dungeon roulettes take about one and a half at most (*if you don't do the main scenario one, which doesn't give that much if you're not levelling a class anyway). As Yoshida -the producer- said, the mission statement isn't that the content is numerous enough so as to require multiple months of grinding to finish it, but rather good enough so that the playerbase is loyal enough to resubscribe when the new content gets released. He dislikes wasting people's time.
Which is what I've been doing. I'm going to resubscribe for a month to do the next patch's content, get that finished and wait for the next one.
